Front Window

Posted on April 30, 2003 in Childhood

Another product of the writing group I attended/facilitated tonight. If you live in South Orange County, California and you like to write, contact me.

My bedroom window faced north, due north, towards the mountains. I could be certain of the directions because my town was founded by Mormons looking for an outlet to the sea for their theocratic democracy of Deseret. They laid out San Bernardino’s streets in a neat grid. Streets that follow lines of longitude were ordered alphabetically, from A to H. Streets that paralleled the Baseline — a mammoth invisible landmark that ran latitudinally through the summit of Mount San Bernardino — were numbered.

We lived in a pink house on Twenty Fifth Street. Because we faced Garden Drive, my view of the mountains was unobstructed. I considered that the key virtue of the place and I have never been happy living in a place unless there has been a porch, a window, or a yard from which I can see a sizeable elevation. I liked the clear vista that my treeless lawn allowed of the long, dark chocolate ridge of the San Bernardino Mountains.

From my desk — one of those boy things done up as a “captain’s sea desk” — I observed the drifting of the tannish smog out of Los Angeles, the blue-bellied storm clouds marching east across the nation, and, sometimes, the hot tarry smoke of fires cutting across the ridges, aided in their advance by the extreme flammability of the greasewood which grew everywhere below the line where the Jeffrey Pines started to replace the high chaparral.